Adventures

Fire Drill

So, the dormitory fire drill. We had all received notice that there was to be a fire drill this morning between 7:30 and 7:45. Fine. I had my coat and my keys by the door, ready to go whenever it went off. I went to bed at about midnight, because i don't have any Friday classes.

Later, the alarm went off, i put on my coat, and joined my roommates in walking out to the parking lot. Once we were out there, someone mentioned that the drill was much earlier than planned -- it was 4:00! Okay, i thought, someone decided to make the drill more realistic. Not so.

After ten minutes of standing around in the cold, the senior resident for our block announced that there had been a fault in the system, and we would still be having the planned drill in about three hours.

He let us all back into the building, and i knew i was too wide awake from being outside to go back to sleep. So, i called Andy, who was very surprised to hear from me at that hour. We talked for a little bit, and i finally went back to sleep around 5:45.

Later, the alarm went off again, and we all trooped out as we were supposed to. This one was the real drill, but we still had to stand around in the cold for ten minutes again. I had pulled my warmer coat out of the closet before heading downstairs this time.

Again, we returned to the dorm, and i tried to go to sleep. I had just succeeded in relaxing enough to doze off when the alarm went off again. This time it only lasted a couple of seconds, thank goodness. Unfortunately, i have been unable to go back to sleep since.

I am too tired to do anything meaningful, such as transcribe medical records or decline some Latin nouns, but i am too awake to sleep. Argh.

Photo credit: stefrobb

Success!

This is a little nerdy, so skip it is you don't know what CSS is. There's a lovely post below it about my first day of classes.

I have been trying off and on for the past month to figure out how to get a list of the allowable HTML tags for comments to show up somewhere near the comments box on my blog.

I knew i needed to use the :before pseudo-element that another wordpress user, atthe404, referred to here, but i wasn't able to understand the syntax of the tag or what element it needed to be attached to until tonight.

The finished bit of code:

.form-textarea:before {
font-size:x-small;
font-style:italic;
content:"Allowed HTML tags: strong, em, blockquote, strike, a, abbr, acronym, & code";
padding:2px;
}

I am so psyched that this actually worked!

The real first day of school

Finally! I actually had some classes today:

• Medieval Latin, taught by a fast-talking Englishwoman. I hope i can keep up.


• Gender, Politics, and Power, populated today with only three students including myself. More are supposedly coming next week.


• Research Resources and Skills for Historians (RRSH), which consisted of the main professor reading the course syllabus to us for an hour. One of my colleagues said he counted 181 "uhm"s or "uh"s from the prof during the lecture. Dry.

All i have to do tomorrow is get up for a fire drill sometime around 7:30am.

A better write-up of my Vancouver visit

Raincoaster has written a post of our Vancouver encounter from last month, and i highly recommend it. It's way better than the one i did, plus it has footage of eels (that's not a plate of eels over there, by the way; it's squid).

Photo credit: Diva Eva

Hen

I met a former Glaswegian named Des at my job this past summer. He grew up in the Gorbals, and he enjoys speaking his childhood dialect from time to time. He usually did this with a kind of half-squinty-eyed-Popeye expression on his face that was hilarious. Des claimed that middle aged women of a certain class (let's just say, not a class of the upper variety) call each other "hen" in Glasgow.

I was so happy today when i actually heard the usage. A middle aged woman at the postgraduate club said, "I'n't that right, hen?" to another woman this afternoon.

I wish i had Des's email address so i could tell him, but i don't. So, i will leave it to you all to spread the word, hen.

OK, let’s go already

Classes start tomorrow. Except not for me. My roommates in the MBA program actually have reading they are supposed to have done for the first day of class tomorrow. The Faculty of Arts and the History Department are not in so much of a hurry.

Tuesday morning at 11:00 is our departmental orientation, and at 5:30 in the afternoon is the Faculty induction. That's it. That's my whole schedule for tomorrow.

Normally i wouldn't be complaining about such a light schedule, but i have had basically nothing to do since Wednesday afternoon. I don't actually have a class until Thursday at noon. Ugh.

Housekeeping

I have done a little cleanup and re-arranging of the sidebar. If there is something missing that you used to use, please either drop me a note using the contact form on my "About Me" page found here or leave a comment on this post.

There’s another one!

Someone clicked the link for my thesis today. Who was it? C'mon, fess up.

Advice

Advice to students enrolling at Glasgow University for the first time: If anyone tells you, "you don't need to do anything else, we'll take care of it," do NOT believe them. Also, check your bank's withdrawal limits before trying to spend $10,000 at one sitting.

I managed to register and pay my tuition today, but it took about two hours. I showed up in Hunter Halls this morning about 30 minutes after registration opened, and i had to wait only a couple of minutes before i was talking to a registrar. He told me i couldn't register. What?

Before i could register, i needed faculty approval. But the history department had told me i didn't need to do anything about getting that; they would take care of it. This was apparently completely incorrect. What really got me was that one of the registrars said they had turned away maybe half a dozen students with this issue already that morning. Six students in half an hour who had no idea that they needed to meet with some person they had never heard of, who wasn't even part of their academic department.

Luckily, my faculty advisor, Dr. McCue, was very nice, and she was available. I had to wait about 30 minutes to see her, but when i did, the process only took 10 minutes at the most. So, i returned to Hunter Halls secure in the knowledge that i was approved.

And indeed i was approved. Now to try to pay. With my £4000 scholarship, i only needed to pay £5000 today (or the first of two installments of £2500). No problem, right? I had $18,000 sitting in my checking account, so all they needed to do was run my debit card through the machine.

Declined for £5000.

Declined for £2500.

I left the building and threw my things down on a bench in frustration. Then i got on the phone to my bank. I was surprised to actually speak to a person, since it was only 5:45 am in the eastern US at the time, but i talked to a woman who told me the limit on debit card transactions is $5000 per day. Fricking exchange rate.

So, after checking the available credit on my Visa card, i went back in. While it is University policy to only allow students to spread their tuition payments over two cards, they allowed me to use three: my debit card, my Visa card, and my British bank card.

I think i ended up overdrawing my British account, but i can fix that tomorrow.

What fun. You know, it seems that international banking is getting harder and harder instead of easier. If we have such a global economy, why is it so much trouble to spend my dollars as pounds?

Big Kahuna

This is late, but i wanted to post about it anyway. On September 9, David completed a long-course triathlon in Santa Cruz, California. He did incredibly well, and i'm really proud of him.
The Big Kahuna Triathlon: a 1.2-mile swim, a 56-mile bike and a 13.1-mile run.

He placed 69th out of 97 in his age group and 526th out of 820 overall. Good job, Dave!

Photo credit: brightroom

Glasgow

Janette & Scott dropped me off at my residence hall yesterday, and i have spent today wandering around Glasgow a little. Very little, actually, since i had to talk to a couple of people about getting my internet access up and running (this involved walking back and forth between my room and another residence hall down the street). I also took a nap.

But, i did walk down Argyle Street, which is the main street near my hall. I had fish & chips for lunch from the local chippie, and i wandered through Kelvingrove Park. The park lies between my hall and the main university campus, so it will likely be the way i go to class. It is full of Victorian statuary commemorating people like the veterans of the Boer War, the man who designed a way to get fresh water to Glasgow from a nearby loch, and random Glaswegians whom i should probably recognize but don't.

My room in the residence hall is fine. I have a private bathroom, and i share kitchen facilities with four other students. I have met two of my roommates so far, Ramin and Vilim (male and female, respectively), and i know there is a Japanese guy here, too. We don't know yet if the fifth room will be taken; i assume it will be sometime this week. My window looks out at a subway line (obviously above-ground at this point), the BBC Scotland headquarters, and the Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre (which i would link to, but their site is down). The SECC building is known as "the armadillo", but i can't tell from here that it looks like that (too many trees and at the wrong angle).

This is going to be a great city to take photographs of, as long as we get a little sun sometime.

Photo credit: queen_of_scum

No, i haven’t died…

In response to The Other Dave's comment, no i haven't died. I have just been busy/tired/internet deprived. I'll be back soon, i promise :-)